Portfolio Management during COVID-19

Portfolio Management 

At last month’s MetaBreakfast event we were talking about the Future of Capital Portfolio Management and how it can’t be a set and forget activity. The current situation with the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced this more than ever.  

With every business impacted, it has never been more important to make sure we’re managing our capital investment effectively. Some of the key elements to managing our portfolios are ensuring: 

• Accountability – Does everyone know their role in managing portfolios?  

• They need the right skills to understand the impact of change and be prepared to take appropriate action? 

• Awareness – Do you know how your Portfolio is performing? 

• Is there appropriate visibility across the portfolio to enable the organisation to continuously monitor and adjust? 

• Adaptive – Are you ready to move if risks eventuate? 

• Does the organisation have effective controls and plans in place before events overtake you? 

As we work with our clients to help review their portfolio’s to ensure they are still aligned with the changing direction and priority of the business, we’ve chosen to share a Portfolio Prioritisation Template which may be useful to help rank what projects you are going to focus on. 

What  

The Portfolio Prioritisation Template helps to rank the projects in your portfolio against a set of business criteria which you can use to model the composition of your portfolio. It is a useful tool which can help to remove any emotion from ‘Pet’ projects when applying ranking to our initiatives. 

Why 

Understanding how best to utilise the available capital to invest across the business is fundamental to maximising the return on our investment and delivering against our business objectives.  

By understanding the ranking of our initiatives within the portfolio, it aids in decision making to ensure we start, stop or pause the right initiatives. 

How 

The template focuses on 4 main areas to evaluate your projects against: 

• Your Strategic Objectives; 
• Direct Financial Value; 
• Alignment to Business Plan; and 

• Risk. 

To use the template you’ll need to include your specific objectives and goals, apply a weighting to each and set the evaluation criteria that you will use. Once this is done, you can evaluate each initiative and it will provide a ranking based on the achievement of this criteria. Change the rankings and weightings to try different scenarios for discussions – remember there is no perfect answer, just the one decision makers are most comfortable with. 

We hope you find this useful as you evaluate and reprioritise your portfolio! 

Download our Portfolio Prioritisation Template here about.